I Love It When A Plan Comes Together

[First, a note about my sometimes non-contemporaneous blogging (since some people have asked):  Originally, I had wanted to write about everything essentially as it happened, however: (1) there isn't always internet access; (2) even if there is, there's often no time to blog in a thoughtful way, especially during staging, orientation, and PST; and (3) time to process hopefully makes for more informative, if not better written, posts.]

Upon reflection and having been through most of PST, I'd say that the Peace Corps has developed a thoughtful and effective process for gradually easing you away from home and immersing you into your country of service.

As I touched on last time, at staging you spend your first, adrenalin-filled night away from the psychological comfort of whatever community you're leaving.  You're rooming with a stranger, which begins to prepare your subconscious for the first of many changes to your personal space, but he or she is an American and you know that you have at least one thing in common to talk about.  Any feelings of unease from the unfamiliar surroundings and impending unknown are hopefully mitigated by forming the foundations of a new community, your Peace Corps community (which, you will be told, will bring with it some of your best friends for the rest of your life).  The substance of the staging program gives you an intellectual preview of and preparation for what's to come.  Meanwhile, you have most of the conveniences of home.  If not more: Our hotel had Select Comfort beds (with the adjustable firmness controls), which I, for one, did not have in my American home.

At orientation, changes to personal space continue: we had three people to a room; six to a suite.  But we were all Americans, and we had gotten to know each other a bit in our travels.  The comforts and conveniences began to get scaled back in comparison to what most of us were probably spoiled with used to in the U.S.  We had a hotel-like bathroom with a western toilet (i.e., not a squat) but no toilet seat.  Since we would soon enough be doing the full squat anyway, I thought of it as preparation and hands-on training, so to speak.   There were other minor inconveniences, such as flies everywhere, basically no internet, no shower curtain, and unreliable hot water and electricity. At the same time, cultural changes started to be introduced: different food, language, etc.  Even though most of the people you see every day are still 44 other American trainees, you work with Host Country National ("HCN") PC staff and have the opportunity to interact with HCN hotel staff.   

In general ("ümümiyyətlə"), it's hard to put into words, but the atmosphere is decidedly different.  There's no question that you're a guest in another country.  For anyone familiar with Italian neorealism, I often felt like I was walking through an Antonioni movie ("kino").  In particular, many of the sights reminded me of Red Desert, which is filled with unconventionally beautiful landscapes.

Anyway, just when you were maybe starting to get used to things, it's time to schlep your bags to your training site.   This time, the strangers with whom you're sharing personal space are Azərbaycani. Luckily, they, too, have undergone training - about what to expect from living with an American for the next three months.  (To sum up: we are apparently very fond of showers and need a certain amount of alone time.)   Most of the day is still spent in training with Americans, but under the community-based training model, it's only a handful of them instead of all 44 trainees at once.  The quantity and degree of cultural change increases dramatically as you integrate, Inşallah (God willing), into your host family in a well-intentioned, but often comic, combination of a few memorized words and phrases, a lot of misunderstandings, and countless gesticulations that would probably be farcical if they weren't so earnest.

Conveniences vary greatly from host fam to host fam, but for many they continue to get scaled back. Generally, there isn't A/C or heat at school ("məktəb") or home ("ev"), so in the winter (we've had snow a couple of times already, which isn't typical), one shouldn't be surprised to keep on all layers while in school or when burrowing into the PC-issue "brown monster" sleeping bag.  If you're lucky, during language class you can huddle next to the portable space heater, whose heating power is usually such that you can cradle it with your bare hands without getting burned.   At home, the bath and toilet ("hamam-tualet") are usually ("adətən") in a structure separate from the house and are, if this is possible, even less insulated.   By way of illustration (and not complaint), my toilet at home has a window that is simply a square hole in the wall, so when the wind blows and there's precipitation, it rains or snows on me while I'm using the facilities.  [Update: after this last snow (on Thanksgiving), a sheet of plastic was nailed over the window hole.]  Although it's not as cozy as sitting on a heated toilet seat in a high-tech Japanese bathroom, it was easy enough to adapt to, and frankly, the first time it happened while I was squatting in sub-zero conditions, I thought, "Hey, cool, snow."

None of us came here unprepared for discomfort, and it's nothing compared to the hardships that other volunteers undergo in other countries.  At least we have (mostly) the basic utilities: running water, gas, electricity, and phones.  There's a reason that service in Azərbaycan has sometimes been referred to as the "Posh Corps."

But, uh, back to the lecture at hand: the process of gradual immersion in an unfamiliar country.  After PST?  Well, we're not there quite yet, but when we move to site in early December ("Dekabr"), we can already see that we will spend the vast majority of our time working and living with HCNs, and we will have substantially less contact with other PCVs.  Some PCVs have no "site-mates," as they're called, while others will have several.  (For example, Gəncə is reputed to have so many PCVs and other ex-pats that there's a risk of living there in a kind of mini-America and failing to really integrate.)  Most of us will probably live within at least two hours of another PCV, but as a matter of course, all of us will be more fully immersed in the language and culture on a day-to-day basis.  And that sounds just about right.